Editorial

Abstract

EditorialCultural practices of reading and writing, more than formal teaching and learning processes, have for time immemorial been a controversial and complex theme in the human and social sciences because of their political scope and implications for social life and for each individual in particular. This issue of the Revista Brasileira de Educação [The Brazilian Journal] (RBE) focuses on these practices from the perspective of educational research and its historic, sociocultural, cognitive and emotional aspects. The various articles directly or indirectly problematize the fact of having access or not to these practices, of being denied these immaterial goods, or not, revealing the repercussions on the conditions of the literate or the illiterate, of professional insertion or exclusion, the division between erudite and popular knowledge, the perception of the urban and of the rural, the opposition between civilization and barbarity.Correlated to the attributions of the school to promote the universalization of reading and writing, other themes of equal interest, such as authority and power, run through the articles and renovate the debate, focusing on the concepts of autonomy and empowerment that impose themselves in late modernity. The issue returns to the contributions of Paulo Freire and Célestin Freinet about education as a democratic space of cooperation. The later notion, selected as the main theme of the II Biennale of Education (Paris, 2015), is inserted in a new "culture of action"and is rich in opportunities for educational research about collective action, coparticipation, experience and accompaniment.The first article, Rural readers: ethical-practical appropriation in the meanings attributed to reading, by Lisiane Sias Manke, presents a reflection on reading practices in a rural environment, based on Roger Chartier's concept of appropriation and on the theoretical contributions of Bernard Lahire, who proposes analyses on a scale in which the social is individually addressed. The study of the trajectories of six men and women from rural areas, all more than 70 years old, who read daily, allows sketching another image of reading practices in the social world and demystifies differences between urban and rural cultural habits. In the narratives of these http://dx